If you've worked with putting filters on your site, chances are this may be the only one you've seen:

If you haven't seen that filter, that probably means you aren't filtering out your internal traffic. Here's some more information on how to do that.

Other than the IP filter, many site owners aren't aware of what the filter feature is truly capable of. The main reason? Filters are kind of scary. We work with them on a regular basis and still do testing and peer review before deploying them.

In fact we always recommend testing them on a nice, safe test profile before applying them to your main profile.

So what exactly can you do with filters? Short answer: a lot.

Here are some examples of custom profiles you can create using filters:

• Pull in data for a single domain or for all domains combined
• Adwords traffic only
• Make your urls all lowercase to fix capitalization discrepancies 

Here's a glimpse of the drop-down that lists the many options:

That's probably a lot to process but here's a little advice that might help: Find a blank whiteboard or legal pad and start brainstorming a wish list of profiles (i.e. we'd really like to see our blog traffic on its own but also want a profile that shows how blog traffic interacts with the main site).

Once you have your wish list, you're ready to start identifying which filters are right for you. We'd love to help you with this process or answer any questions you might have about filters. We can even audit your site and make recommendations for which filters might be useful for you.